Race And Manifest Destiny Summary

In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman surveys the origins and progression of Anglo-Saxon racial ideology and examines its consequences in American history. Primarily a history of ideas, the book sets the developments of ideologies of post American Revolution and expansion of newly founded America. Anglo-Saxon supremacy allowed for the suppression of other peoples in American history—it justified their enslavement, domination, exclusion, and extinction.

In the early 1840s John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, spoke of the term Manifest Destiny to describe American expansion. O’Sullivan described the nation’s expansion as inevitable and criticized those that imposed on that process "for the avowed object of thwarting our

To add on to their myth of superiority, Anglo-Saxons created another myth that claimed they were descendants of a great Aryan nation. Just as their descendants centuries later, the Aryan nation, spread its civilization across Europe, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English laid claim to a superb racial heritage. British colonists in American also sided to the great myths. Scientists, scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic supported these myths of racial greatness. The English supporters of a chosen race respected their institutions as proof of a nation’s greatness and showed how concepts of liberty, natural rights and popular sovereignty translated over to the colonies. In the process, in both in Britain and America, a transformation occurred whereby the English shifted praise from their political institutions as Anglo-Saxonism became racialized which ultimately led to the submission and oppression of Native Americans, Blacks, and Mexicans. Horsman adds on to the manner in which Anglo-Saxon and the Aryan nation myths influenced racial thinking in England, he examines the oddness of American life

He shows how, in the decades after the American Revolution, Americans as well as European people developed ideas about the racial inferiority of other “lesser” peoples to justify the eventual cruel and unjust treatment of these groups. Horsman notes that while many Americans in the early years of the colonies agreed all humans are descended from one pair of people and the differences in skin color are due to differences in environment, climate, and geographical location, but this changes in the early nineteenth century. (Horsman 99-101) This is due to the influences of the Romantic Movement and its emphasis on the distinct traits and uniqueness of that individual as well as the existence of slavery at the time in a country that some referred to as the world’s freest nation. Finally, Horsman traces how the idea of racial inferiority begins to solidify and gains momentum throughout the mid nineteenth century and is used as justification for not only slavery but also Indian removal and the Mexican